Our current populist culture and its Jeffersonian antecedents

By BILL CHAISSON
I was dismayed, but not especially surprised by the prejudiced comments below our Facebook post about Elizabeth Warren’s visit to Claremont. I suppose the posters will defend their comments as expressions of “free speech,” but it isn’t. If it isn’t true, it is actually libel or slander. After reading the posts I went to the Fox News website, because I know that a lot of “left haters” get their cues from right-leaning news sources like Fox. I scrolled down past the opinion pieces (which came first because the site’s algorithm deemed them “more relevant”) and got to an article that reported on her appearance in Manchester. It was a straight news report until the end, when the reporter (or his editor) figured out a way to mention Warren’s DNA kerfuffle of last fall. 

Apparently, someone asked her if she supported the recent New Hampshire bill that proposed renaming Columbus Day “Indigenous Peoples Day.” Unsurprisingly, she did. It should be mentioned that in Hawaii, which has a large indigenous population, the holiday has been called “Discoverers Day” since at least the early 1980s. It recognizes the Polynesian, not the European, discovery of the islands. Which is to say, recognizing indigenous peoples instead of Columbus is hardly a new idea. But Fox News dragged it into the story to inflame the prejudices of its audience.

The “most relevant” piece in the search, i.e. it came first in the queue, was by Chris Stirewalt and was not labeled opinion, but clearly was. Stirewalt recounts Warren’s recent speech at historically black Morgan State University in Maryland. “The joke here is that Warren did once present herself as a person of color back when it was advantageous for her to do so in the nerd-eat-nerd world of big-time academia.” And then he simply moves on, claiming “she had less Indian ancestry than the average white American.” Here Stirewalt ignores Warren’s own statements and also shows the widespread lack of understanding about how DNA tests work. He brushes all this aside to press his invented advantage. And on it goes. So, this is what our local posters are reading. This is what is being passed off as “news” or “information” in many quarters today. 

Is any of this new? Not really. This kind of mudslinging in a U.S. campaign was invented in 1800 in the contest between John Adams and his own vice president, Thomas Jefferson. Jefferson is said to have won the election because he hired the prototype of Karl Rove, James Callender. Callender was a political operative and journalist in Scotland and emigrated to the United States. In addition to labeling Adams a tyrant, he helped convince the public that the president wanted to invade France, which was quite untrue. The Adams campaign, in turn, called Jefferson, among other things, “the son of a half-breed Indian squaw,” also quite untrue. The Adams administration prosecuted Callender for sedition (fomenting insurrection against the government) and he went to prison until Adams left office in March 1801, when the new president, Jefferson, pardoned him. After Jefferson won, Callender felt he had been inadequately compensated and turned on his employer, exposing his relationship with Sally Hemings.

Now that we have social media, every Tom, Dick, and Henrietta can get into this kind of partisan scrum. The posters to our Facebook page were simply repeating the untruths and quasi-facts of modern-day James Callenders. I feel sure that this kind of thing went on in taverns throughout the young republic in 1800. Now trash talk goes out to a much wider audience.

It isn’t just the ostensible right that engages in this sort of thing. When I was working in central New York and following hydraulic fracturing (“fracking”) for natural gas in adjacent Pennsylvania, some of the most extensive “reporting” was by ProPublica. The reporters were obviously virulently anti-fracking and didn’t know much about the drilling process or geology. As a result, the articles were very one-sided and at times not especially accurate. The sheer volume of the journalism seemed to impress those opposed to fracking, which is frankly also the case when you turn to the likes of Fox News or Breitbart to read about Elizabeth Warren.

Then there are the bloggers who take information and opinion from professional sources like Fox and give it their own extreme-partisan spin. Take for example the guy who worked for Vulture who read too much of the social media and partisan media coverage of the recent confrontation among the Covington high school students, indigenous American protestors, and the Black Hebrew Israelites in Washington. Initial coverage made it seem like the high schoolers had harassed the indigenous protestors. As it turned out they weren’t terribly respectful, but had done little more than stand around and smirk at them. According to an NPR interview with one of the indigenous protestors, he confronted the high schoolers when he thought the standoff between them and the Black Hebrew Israelites might turn violent. In the end, there was, in fact, no violence, but the media and social media spun it quite out of control, leading this Vulture guy to wish the Covington students (and their parents) dead in (following the presidents lead) a tweet. At least he was fired.

Call us out of step with the zeitgeist, but the Eagle Times is simply not “down with this.” We deleted the posts at our Facebook page because, well, it’s our Facebook page and we don’t want it filled with untruthful accusations and, frankly, hate. We didn’t manage to take them down before some folks from the ostensible left began taking potshots at “Trumptards.” As my brief summary of the campaign of 1800 shows, this is all hardly new, but it doesn’t mean we all have to go along with it.

 

Bill Chaisson is the editor of the Eagle Times.